Robert Tracinski devotes a Federalist column to the impact of the second Republican presidential debate on the fortunes of two candidates.

My premise is that the three people at the top of the polls right now have never been elected to or served in public office, and that makes them highly unlikely to be the eventual nominee. Outsiders are appealing, but they never get the nomination, and probably for good reason. Not only do they have no experience running campaigns and winning elections, they also have no direct track record we can look to if we want to guess how they will really vote and make decisions under the pressures of public office. This early, a few months into the primary race, we don’t even know whether they have the discipline and commitment to see a campaign out to the end, or whether they will decide the actual lifestyle of a politician isn’t worth living. …

… So I’ve been wondering which of the remaining experienced politicians would come out of last week looking like a new front-runner. Well, we’ve had a couple of days and a few poll results, and we’re beginning to see the answer.

There are two candidates who came out of last week with a definite gain in the polls. Not by coincidence, they are the ones who made the biggest impression in last week’s debate. But here’s the twist. One of the “real” candidates who is emerging is one of political outsiders I had dismissed. And it’s getting a little harder to do that.

The two people who broke out in a new CNN poll are Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio. …

… It’s easy to see why Fiorina has done so well. She may have never held office, but I’m now convinced we can’t dismiss her as a personality-driven protest vote. (I’ll let you decide for yourself who that description applies to.) What struck people about her most in the debate was not just her poise and spunkiness, but the depth of her knowledge and thinking about the big issues. There were only two candidates on stage, for example, who could really tell you exactly what was going wrong in the Middle East and exactly what they would do about. And believe it or not, there are a lot of us who think that’s kind of important for someone who wants to be commander-in-chief.